Why product attributes in Magento 2 are important and what you need to know about them

Since we can define a product as a certain list of its attributes, we cannot deny that attributes are of a great importance. And for e-commerce, it is really crucial: to introduce a product from as many sides as it is digitally possible.

As a merchant, you always seek to provide your customers with the most detailed information on your goods on Magento 2 category, product, blog pages and more for the customers can easily browse and promptly find what they are looking for.

Naturally, any aspects that make a particular product unique should be specified as an attribute in a catalog for a proper indexing. And, as a result — for a better filtering, better searching and comparing, etc.

However, you should also put some efforts into making customers find this product. This is where Magento 2 Elastic Search can be of help.

Product attributes and attribute sets

There are approximately six dozens of product attributes available by default in Magento 2. Moreover, you can add as many custom attributes as you need. To add a product attribute, you should as well specify its attribute set. Magento 2 attribute sets can be really helpful to manage an information order, since a particular attribute may be relevant only to some group of products.

For instance, your enterprise deals with watches. This product is quite unique and has its specifications. You want to represent this in your web store accurately: you want to differ analog, quartz, digital, other watches. So, you create an attribute that is a Type, but specifically for watches. You don’t want to mix it with other Types of apparel, bags, accessories, etc.

And this is what attribute set is good to use for. You assign the Type attribute you create for watches to Watches’ attribute set (i.e., not default). This way a field with this Type (for instance, a drop-down with the watches types) will appear only in the settings of the watches products, and later, as a part of the information on their product pages.

Consider that before you start adding new products to your catalog. It is better to plan the correlation of attribute sets with products forehand. As due to the default Magento 2 functionality, it is not possible to change the attribute set once you assigned it to a product.

How to add a new custom product attribute?

In Magento 2, to create a custom product attribute, go to the Admin Panel>Stores>Attributes>hit the Add New Attribute button:

Specify the name of a product attribute in the Default Labelfield.

As for the Catalog Input Type for Store Owner (basing on Magento 2 default product structure) you can select one of the following:

Text Field

(A single line text field may be used for the Name attribute, for instance)

Text Area

(A text field that displays text paragraphs may be used for Description attribute and may be formatted in HTML)

Date

(For date values – Date attribute – input it right away or pick up from the calendar)

Yes/No

(A drop-down with Yes/No options, may be used for Newor Saleattributes)

Multiple Select

(A list of options, which you can multi check with held down Ctrl key, may be used for Activity, Climate, Materialattributes)

Dropdown

(A list of options with one possible selection may be used for Shipment type, Tax Classattribute)

Price

(Use it for Price, Special Price, Tier Price)

Media Image (Additional image)

Fixed Product Tax

Visual Swatch

(Use it for Color, Brand)

Text Swatch

(Use it for Size)

Thereupon, navigate to Attribute Properties:

Values Required – Yes

You mostly need to enable Values Required for crucial product attributes like Product Name, SKU, Price, which means that without this values being specified a product will not be created.

Product attributes in Amasty extensions

Layered Navigation/ Filtering

Improved Layered Navigation is probably the most wanted thing within any e-commerce project. All merchants are craving to manage a perfect browsing experience for their customers since this directly affects the conversion. The extension out of the box alone will make your web store much faster, but you can make it really excellent by simply adding a little bit of configuring. The idea is to make every product attribute adequately filterable and findable.

How to make an attribute filterable?

Let’s have a look at the Storefront Propertiessettingsof a particular product attribute.

To make an attribute filterable and searchable:

set Use in Searchsetting to Yes;

additionally, you can specify the Search Weightof an attribute in the search;

set Use in Layered Navigation to either Filterable (with results) or Filterable (no results).

How to create a Brand product attribute?

Go to the Admin Panel>Attributes>Product>Add New Attribute;

Select Visual Swatch for Catalog Input Typefor Store Owner:

Add and manage Swatches:

Make an attribute filterable, as it is described above;

Go to the Admin Panel>Attributes>Attribute Set>select the Default set, if you want to specify a brand for each product of your catalog;

Drag and drop brand attribute to any place you would like it to appear in a product details list in the backend:

Product Labels/ Conditions

Product Labels is a clear in settings and understandable extension. Mostly, all the combinations don’t acquire any manipulations with the product attributes. In most cases, you work directly with the products. As long as you don’t work with conditions, everything is very intuitive. The complexity of conditions is namely the product attributes challenge.

The following prescriptions are going to help you at the stage when you want to set conditions.

To allow attributes to operate in conditions:

Go to the Admin Panel>Attributes>Product> select a particular attribute;

Go to its Storefront Properties;

Set Use for Promo Rule Conditions to Yes:

Advanced Search / Weight

As much as efficient navigation, a successful web store needs a good search. And again we can’t avoid dealing with the product attributes. You can significantly improve search performance by regulating the search weight of the product attributes.

With Advanced Search for Magento 2, it easy to make the search results more relevant. For instance, the search weight feature allows you to significantly improve the results by color:

Elastic Search/ Search query

One of its distinctive features is the extensive settings for a search query. Alongside with the possibility to set the type of autocomplete suggestions (wildcard), you can specify search type preferences for each product attribute:

For instance, for SKU, it is better to use a wildcard search, while for descriptions – an autocorrection. You can specify a match mode for the keywords as well — the way how they are combined (AND/OR).

Conclusion

As you see, product attributes are crucial when it comes to filtering, searching, and comparing products. Product attributes can significantly affect the functionality of your web store: boost or slow it down. So take time to configure them in the right way.

About The Author

Pavel is a writer and researcher who studied digital humanities and new media. Being addicted to large amount of information, he produces an appropriate and engaging content. Besides working with content, Pavel is heavily interested in studies on human-machine interaction.